GONDOS—Chapter 8!
The novelization of the major motion picture “Gondos,” serialized every Wednesday and Thursday. For more information and to get caught up, click here.
PREVIOUSLY…
Guy enlisted a street artist to produce a drawing of the creatures—which, Millie determined, are mutant products of the AquaStop’s ecological degradation of the lagoon.
Lopez seethed, still hoping to stamp out the problem in secret.
As Guy insisted they’d need a fleeter, nimbler vehicle with which to fight the creatures, Millie drew an idea from her past…
New Year’s Day, 2000. A new millennium. A new life.
Millie was ten. She woke up at sunrise on her grandfather’s pull-out couch and stayed silent for as long as she could, hearing the old man still snoring in the other room. But her bladder was full; her stomach, growling. She tiptoed past his door toward the kitchen like an intruder, which is exactly how she felt.
Millie and her parents had left their house in Vermont before dawn on Christmas morning and, three days later in the middle of the night, arrived here, at her grandfather’s timber-framed cabin near Everglades City, Florida. The next day, her parents got right back in the car without her and drove to the other side of the state.
They were going camping at an Indian Reservation for a few days, to ring in the new year at a string of concerts by their favorite band, Phish. Phish was their obsession; they’d named Millie after a woman in one of their songs.
Millie was accustomed to being left behind. Back home, she was periodically pawned off on neighbors while her parents followed Phish around New England for four or five days at a time. Her mom and dad were much younger than all the other parents; it made sense to her that they’d act less grown-up, too. (They didn’t even always seem to have jobs.) One time they’d left on a whim without telling her, without putting any plan in place. That morning, Millie had found a note and fifteen dollars on the kitchen table. She was eight. She made a frozen waffle, packed a peanut butter sandwich and carrot sticks and called a friend for ride to school.
Still, this time, she might have preferred being completely abandoned to being left with this old man in Florida whom she’d only once met before. Her grandpa didn’t seem so comfortable with the arrangement either. He’d always lived alone and spent all day in his workshop behind the house.
“Call me Cooper,” he’d told Millie as her parents pulled away. “I haven’t earned ‘Grandpa.’ Not yet.’”
Now, creeping into the kitchen, Millie grabbed a bag of sandwich bread off the counter and snuck out the back door. The Everglades outside were an astonishment. Millie loved the landscape when it was this, silent in the morning. She loved to track the winding paths that the shallow water found through the sawgrass marshes, the blotches of color wherever the water lilies and bladderwort bloomed.
She squatted in some reeds to pee and ate a couple of slices of the bread. Then she climbed into the plastic kayak Cooper had taught her how to paddle and pushed off.
To give her something to do, Cooper had printed out a checklist of local fauna and told Millie that he’d pay her a dollar for each species she spotted before her parents returned. Some were easy: mangrove, snapping turtle, spoonbill. But four days had passed—her parents would be back that afternoon—and there was still so much she hadn’t seen.
Millie had been paddling for about an hour when she came across the ibises. There were thirty of them—a huge congregation—their white bodies arrayed in a clearing, their long, pinkish beaks poking at the shallow water to hunt for their breakfasts, just like Millie had done inside.
She noticed the birds were moving oddly though—jittering and splashing, seeming to lose their balance. She watched one stab its beak into the water and just leave it there, its head rolling slowly to the side as if it were falling asleep. And when she paddled in to take a closer look, and the birds got spooked and tried to take flight. But heir wings unfolded clumsily, as though they weren’t accustomed to being used.
When Millie returned, Cooper had already sealed himself in his workshop for the day, so she read and killed time, waiting for her parents. They did not show. Finally, late that evening, while she and Cooper split a can of Beefaroni in silence, the phone rang, and Cooper carried it into the other room.
The conversation was brief. Millie heard her grandfather say, “Margo, I’m not equipped for this. I’m not equipped for this, Margo.” When he reappeared, handing her the receiver to talk to her mom, she mouthed “Tell her I’m in the shower,” and climbed up to the attic and cried.
She understood what was happening—or thought she did—because things like this had happened so many times before.
But this time was different. It would be six months before Millie saw her parents again and then, after a brief reunion at her grandfather’s, they’d take off again, essentially for good. Millie would do the rest of her growing up here, with Cooper in the swamp.
The next morning, Cooper got up early and fixed two packs of instant oatmeal.
“Peaches and cream, or apples and cinnamon?” he asked.
She asked for the peaches and cream.
“That’s the one I like,” Cooper said.
Millie clammed up. But Cooper winked and said, “I guess we have that in common,” and handed her the bowl.
While they ate, Millie told him about the ibises. She asked why they were acting so strangely, like they were drunk.
“Heavy metals,” he said.
“The music?”
“No, metals. Mercury. Cadmium. Lead. It leeches out of fertilizer and pesticides from all those farms you probably drove past on your way here. They get into the groundwater, which drains this way, and those metals wind up inside the fish. They’re neurotoxins—they mess with your brain. After years of eating the toxic fish, the birds act screwy.”
“How do we help them?”
“Millie,” he said, “I can fix almost anything, but I can’t fix that.”
The girl cocked her head sideways. It didn’t compute.
She asked for some paper and a pen.
“Attention: Save the Ibises” the poster read in a child’s wonky block letters.
Millie lifted up the paper to show Cooper and begged him to take her to make copies—three hundred and twenty-five of them; for some reason, this was the number she had in mind.
Cooper got several rolls of quarters and the keys to his truck.
The Xerox machine at the public library was out of commission. Cooper suspected it would be faster to fetch some tools from home, drive back and fix the thing himself, but the kid seemed so darn motivated—so alive for the first time since she’d been staying with him—that, not wanting to quash her momentum, he put her back in the truck and drove them to a Kinko’s an hour away.
When they returned home with the three hundred and twenty-five copies, Cooper asked what Millie planned to do with them all. “I’m mailing them to the government and to millionaires,” she said confidently.
“Huh.” He was silent for a moment. “Seems like you’ll need envelopes and stamps then.” And so, they got in the truck again.
It was the first thing he truly did for her—the first act of generosity beyond scooping her some of his food. Since the moment Millie had arrived, Cooper had been watching her move around the house from afar, and it was almost like he could feel her vulnerability in his own body—her blameless need to connect, to be protected, to be loved. But he also felt, just as painfully, his own inability to connect with anyone. He’d always felt far more comfortable with machines than people. You could take a machine apart and see how it worked.
It was true what he’d told Millie’s mother on the phone: he wasn’t equipped to watch this little girl, much less to raise her. But in the months that followed, Cooper started building some of that equipment for himself.
He built shelves in the kitchen and took Millie to the grocery store to buy whatever foods she liked. He built her a desk at which to do her homework , and fixed up the bicycle rusting behind his workshop so that she could ride it to school. He encouraged her to ride wherever she wanted after school, too, and to come home whenever she liked; if he couldn’t be someone a kid could depend on, he would teach her how to be independent instead.
Most afternoons though, Millie would ride straight home and go paddling through the marshes in her kayak; Cooper recognized that this kid was a creature of the water, not the road. And so, as her thirteenth birthday approached, he decided to take an old invention down off a shelf in his workshop and retool it especially for her.
“You’ve heard about the Vietnam war, correct?” he asked after dinner one night, opening a two-pack of Hostess cupcakes and comically cramming thirteen candles into hers. Millie nodded. “And I’m sure your mom told you that I’m actually very rich.”
This time, Millie’s brow scrunched up in confusion, and she glanced around the ramshackle little house wryly, giving him a hard time.
“Well, I am rich, and the two things are related,” he said. “This all has to do with your birthday present, by the way.”
Then, walking her out to his workshop, he began to explain.
Cooper had gotten a scholarship to MIT when he was only 16, he told Millie, to study industrial engineering. This was 1970, the height of the war. Before he’d even graduated, he created a niche for himself making precision bomb springs for the US military—a lucrative extra-curricular. He’d devised a way to cast metal springs more efficiently and was soon making 250,000 bomb fuses a month.
Initially, Cooper considered this work noble. Friends from back home—guys just a couple years older than him—were being blown up, often for no good reason. And Cooper felt he was arming and protecting them as best he could.
But it eventually dawned on him that he was also helping them blow up somebody else’s friends—and just as unnecessarily. So he shuttered the company, refused to sell it or pass on the technology, invested his earnings and watched them grow.
He wasn’t some peacenik. He feared the Communists, bought into the Domino Theory, supported the war. But he didn’t like how sloppily it was being prosecuted. America needed all those bombs he was making because they were dropping them indiscriminately, carpeting the delta from above simply because, it seemed to him, the nation’s military was too primitive, or too cowardly, to fight its enemies down there in the waterways, at close range.
This was unforgivable. It was unimaginative. It was lazy. And therefore, to Cooper, it was un-American. He vowed to come up with a more exacting and virtuous way to fight the war.
For years, he chased idea after idea, he told Millie—all of them flawed. He was living outside Boston, sleeping very little, speaking to almost no one aside from his materials suppliers, not eating a single meal that didn’t come from a can.
Then, one afternoon, the woman who would become Millie’s grandmother, rest her soul, knocked on his door. She was working for the Census—a bit of a hippie, a free spirit. Braids and stuff. She eyed Cooper in the doorway with a mix of pity and lust: this gentle and disheveled shut-in, this handsome lost cause. Cooper tried to send her away, but he was beleaguered, and she was bold as brass. He paused to tell Millie: “I see a lot of her in you.”
In any case, the next morning—Cooper was skipping over some parts—Millie’s grandma insisted they drive to Walden Pond; she loved Thoreau and couldn’t believe Cooper had never been. There, he watched a water snake speed away from the shore, slithering in an ever-shifting S across the surface of the pond with mind-boggling agility and speed. The way its body moved beguiled him. And there it was: the solution to his problem landed on him all at once.
Cooper drove home immediately, so fixated on his vision—on the miraculous movement of that snake—that he forgot all about Millie’s grandmother, stranding her at the pond. He would not see her again for many months, when she knocked on his door again in overalls, her belly the size of a salad bowl.
By then Cooper had cracked it—on paper, at least. He’d designed a completely new kind of vehicle, a new machine: a weapon that was nimbler, more elegant and more humane than a bomb.
The problem was, by the time Cooper perfected his invention, the war was long over. The military had moved on. “They wanted vehicles that could crawl across a desert,” he explained. “Not some futuristic boat.”
And so, his prototypes had sat in his workshop for twenty-plus years. Until recently, when he realized his machine was perfectly suited to a completely different, but equally noble use:
It could allow this woefully mistreated, indefatigable firecracker of a girl to go wherever she wanted, as fast as she could.
“It took me a long time to remove all the weaponry,” Cooper now told Millie, pulling off a tarp to reveal her gift.
The vehicle resembled a kayak crossed with a jet ski, reincarnated into the body of a snake.
It was seven-and-a-half-feet long and machined entirely out of waterproofed, lightweight carbon fiber—sleek and silver, designed to shoot through the surface of the water.
Piloting it was a work-out. Cooper explained that Millie would stand on the small platform at the center—an open cockpit, essentially. Anchored to the floor directly in front of her was the throttle: an upright metal rod, nearly shoulder height. She had to lean with her whole body to force the lever forward and crank it back. Her other hand, meanwhile, would grasp a long pole that rose up behind her. She’d move that one side to side like a rudder, to steer.
There was no actual rudder though—this was the crux of Cooper’s innovation. In a sense, he’d made the entire boat a rudder. It changed directions by changing its shape.
The front of the boat—the kayak-like bow extending forward from where Millie stood—looked like a little like a human spine. A row of concave carbon fiber slats nested in eah other like the tops of spoons. They were tightly coupled, with ball bearings in between, so that the entire neck of the vehicle could bend and articulate fluidly, just like the body of that snake Cooper had seen at Walden Pond. The tail of the boat, behind Millie, was constructed the same way.
They allowed the vehicle to change directions almost instantaneously. By curling the neck or tail, Millie could make the boat suddenly turn or swivel at high speed, then take off again in an entirely different direction. The boat could slither and swerve, pull hairpin turns, spin in place, or clench up and jackknife to a stop—all while Millie balanced gyroscopically at its center, bending her knees to ride the momentum as the craft went spinning under her feet.
Cooper called it “The Dodger,” having designed it to charge through swamps, dodging enemy fire. But Millie instantly loved it too much to let anyone else name it. She insisted on calling it, simply, “my boat.”
He was astonished by how quickly the girl mastered the machine. In no time, it became a second set of legs. And watching her, he began to recognize certain imperfections and dream up improvements. He was overcome with new ideas. Within a month, Cooper was building a second iteration of the vehicle, rolling out schematics during dinner and asking his “test pilot” for input.
For Millie’s sixteenth birthday, Cooper his finished a third and exponentially more sophisticated version of the vehicle, with an engine half the size of the original but four times as strong. He built three of these machines, so that Millie could tear through the Everglades with Kurt and Kris, the twins who lived down the road—the only other kids for miles.
Together, the three of them were fearless, autonomous and proud, blazing around Chokoloskee Bay all summer long, or all the way west to Ten Thousand Islands, or out to the abandoned house a hermit had built on Dismal Key. They invented stunts, perfected routines, and occasionally asked Cooper to film them from the shore. Millie would keep one of those videos—the three of them hotdogging, speeding like electrons in tight, concentric ellipses—saved on her phone for years.
“You’ll kill yourselves on those things,” the twins’ mother would scream as they tore away from the dock. But they never once got hurt. Six years later, a drunk driver killed Kurt instead.
Millie was in California by then, studying environmental science. The way Cooper figured it, she’d probably gotten herself halfway to a master’s degree before even leaving home. While he’d been in his shop, absorbed in his endless refinement of the Dodger, she’d sat her desk with a stack of library books and an Internet connection, researching one threat to the local ecology after another.
Her ibis mailing had been quickly followed by another about amphibians, then a crusade to save an endangered flower. There was no shortage of causes; her adolescence coincided with an era of escalating environmental disarray in southwest Florida: pollution, mismanagement, unintended consequences. Then, when the Deepwater Horizon spill happened, Millie took it hard.
After she left home, Millie and Cooper spoke infrequently. But as timed passed, he noticed a kind of low-grade disillusionment building in the subtext of the occasional emails she sent. Millie had lit out tenaciously to study environmental problems so that they could be solved. But she seemed to be realizing what Cooper long understood: studying problems was how the government and the corporations put off solving them. He worried about his granddaughter. He worried her heart was going flat, like his.
That was probably why he still kept Millie’s original ibis flyer on his refrigerator all these years later: to remember. One morning, reaching to open the fridge for a glass of juice to take his medications, his hand shook and he knocked the paper off. A second spasm sent the pills in his palm onto the floor.
He was on all fours, gathering up the mess, when he heard the screen door open and slap shut and his granddaughter’s voice calling, “Cooper…?”
His wondered if he’d died, if he’d seamlessly transited into the afterlife. How else to explain it? The person he loved most was, again, right here.
“Well look at you now!” he murmured, as though coming out of a trance.
He hoisted himself off the yellow linoleum, revealing the same ratty bathrobe he’d been wearing the morning Millie left. His greasy hair—thinning and fully silver now—swept to one side behind his head, as though blown by a fan. He’d allowed the perpetual stubble Millie remembered to balloon into a formidable beard.
Cooper blinked, grinned, nodded, exhaled in astonishment, clapped his hands. But mostly, he just looked at her. He could not stop looking.
“A hug?” she finally asked. They embraced. Millie peeled away gently while he was still subtly hanging on. She introduced Guy, who extended a hand in one brisk and compact motion. “Sir,” he said.
“Yeah,” Cooper told him, looking down at himself and smirking. “That’s me: Sir.”
Guy felt like he knew the man already. He’d spent the flight from Venice, on one of ELAINE’S corporate jets, listening to Millie recount her years in Everglades City. She spoke with increasing tenderness, tearing up once or twice. And when Guy asked how long it had been since she’d last seen Cooper, Millie had to do the math and seemed embarrassed by the sum: nine years.
“What are you doing here?” Cooper said. “Have you eaten? I have banana bread. With macadamia. I cook now!”
He hadn’t spoken to anyone since his last doctor’s appointment two weeks earlier but was rapidly snapping back to life. He was tying up his bathrobe, smoothing down his beard and shuffling across the room to fetch the pan of banana bread when Millie told him, very seriously, “We need help. It’ll take some explaining.”
“The porch,” Cooper said decisively. “I’ll make coffee.”
How could a person explain it?
Millie and Guy did the best they could. And when they were done, Cooper—who’d taken it all in in silence, who’d even closed his eyes periodically to concentrate on their words, as though the whole insane story were some cosmic koan to contemplate—leaned forward in his chair and slapped his hands on his knees.
“You want to use the Dodgers to save the city of Venice from an alien invasion?” he finally said. “I love it!”
“They’re not aliens,” Millie said.
“Right, right,” Cooper said. He paused, then clapped his hands together again and rubbed them like he was starting a fire. “I love it regardless!”
How amazing, he thought, to stand back and recognize all the strange entanglements that had conspired to make this moment possible. He’d sunk years of his life and a colossal share of his fortune into perfecting those vehicles for warfare—and then, all over again, to perfect them for Millie, as a proxy for everything he was incapable of giving her emotionally. Some weight had always kept him from expressing the warmth he felt for this young woman. But for whatever reason, he could tell that weight had lifted now—as she reappeared out of thin air to reclaim those same machines, thus offering him an opportunity for absolution, for redemption, in more ways than one.
“The military would never listen to me,” he said. “They blew me off. But I knew the Dodgers would find their purpose one day.”
“The boats,” Millie corrected.
“Ha!” he said. “And it brought you back here? I get to see you again…? I love it. I love it. More coffee?”
Guy held out his cup but, instead of pouring it for him, Cooper handed him the pot. That was the first time Millie noticed her grandfather’s hand shaking.
“Sir, we’re here to take a look at the boats,” Guy said calmly. “I need to assess them. That’s Job One.”
Suddenly, a yellow Porsche flew up the gravel driveway in front of them with such velocity that the saw palmettos on either side swayed.
“Cooper,” Millie said, “who’s this?”
Cooper shrugged.
“He’s with me,” Guy said. “That’s my second opinion.”
The man who got out of the car wore a Phillies jersey over a ribbed white tank top and had a smile that seemed three-times too large for his face.
Benny Baldwin was short and boyish-looking, and had once been quite sensitive about it, but had channeled these insecurities into compensatory pursuits like becoming a savant-like mechanic, lifting weights and driving extremely fast. He’d come all the way from Philadelphia and made it in half the time his GPS said.
Guy stepped off the porch to hug Benny—a stoic, efficient embrace—and introduced him around. “Me and this guy go back,” he said. “Benny knows weapons and he knows vehicles. He’s my little brother. My very little brother.”
Benny shrugged. He wasn’t going to take the bait. “Not literally brothers,” he said. “Me and Rondack are like brothers. Otherwise it woulda been incest when I fucked his mother!”
Guy shot Bennie a chastening look; they wouldn’t be talking like that here. Benny immediately stopped cackling and looked at the ground like a scolded dog.
They headed out to Cooper’s workshop where three long shapes, cinched in canvas tarps, were stored on an old lumber rack in the corner. They lifted each one down and carried them to the water. Then, the canvas came off.
“Hey now,” Benny said. He’d arrived with a healthy skepticism, but the look of the machines instantly perked him up. They didn’t look like something an old man would build in his garage. They looked like a Raytheon product. They looked cool.
Millie stepped onto one and gave a tutorial. She went through the shifting and steering motions, in front and behind, and mimed how to lean into the vehicle as it moved, to hunch into the turns.
Guy stepped onto another of the boats and copied her motions—but more exaggeratedly, with less finesse. Without a word, Millie placed both hands on his rock-solid hips to guide his body. Gentler, she told him. Steadier. “You’ll get a feel for it.”
Benny had tucked a wad of chew in his cheek. Guy turned around and snapped, “Get rid of that.” Benny did.
Then Guy Rondack started up his vehicle and jerked away from the shore.
The boat moved in stops and starts and with a pronounced wobble, but gradually straightened out as Guy picked up speed. Soon, he was streaking across the wetland in a wide, smooth arc. As he looped back toward shore, they could see the look of calm concentration on his face give way to a subtle grin.
Benny already had the second vehicle running. Its engine had sputtered to life with a choke and hiccup then blared like a lawnmower, loud and strong. He streaked away heedlessly, at very high speed, and was nearly thrown off the thing within seconds. But he downshifted just in time to stabilize himself, dragging one foot through the water as he came out of his yaw.
Guy, meanwhile, had put himself into a stationary spin, the neck and tail of his boat wrenched hard in opposite directions, like a cursive S. Then he shot out of the spin and whipped right by Benny, splashing him with his wake.
Benny gave him the finger and, righting himself again, gave chase.
“Just like the twins,” Cooper told Millie, as they looked on from the shoreline. “These machines sure bring out the knucklehead in people….Except you.”
Millie didn’t react.
Cooper watched her stare at the two of them, flying around in demented figure eights. They were getting the hang of it, but it was obvious they didn’t realize how far they could push the machines. Cooper could tell it irked Millie; it was like standing over a small child, waiting for him to tie his shoe.
“Go on,” Cooper told her.
So she did.
Millie handed Cooper her phone and wallet and climbed aboard the last boat. The engine snarled. The body rattled.
She examined her controls with great deliberateness. She tested her throttle and rudder rod. She tied her hair back. She locked her fingers and stretched her wrists.
And in an instant, she was gone.
There was, right away, a sense of miraculous cohesion. Millie did not seem to be riding across the surface of the water; she and the boat together seemed like a motion of the water, a wave.
She shoved the rudder rod hard, tracing complicated lines around Guy and Benny and skirting fleetly between them, while her other hand shifted with sudden force. She moved with such effortlessness that she could occasionally remove one hand and calmly wipe the spray from her face.
Watching her, the two men kept catching each other’s eyes, shaking their heads. Guy’s pride was stinging; he was the fighter pilot, after all. At one point, when Millie threw her boat into an impossibly sudden spin then quickly sped out of it, Benny couldn’t help but let out an exhilarated yahoo.
Soon, Millie peeled off through the mangrove swamps, out of sight, luring the men to follow her. Soon, they were threading through tiny islands, catapulting into open water as the rising sun spilled across the sea.
They rode for an hour. Guy was the first to return. Staggering back up the lawn, he could feel Cooper watching him from the kitchen window. The old man had a hunk of banana bread in one hand and was giving a thumbs up with the other. He was beaming. His face said, Did I tell you, or did I tell you?
Benny pulled in next, his clothes soaked from the spray. He was clapping and whooping, shouting to his friend. “These things are sick! And imagine when we get some rifles back on ‘em. You wanted a warship-style gondola? These are like Batmobile-style gondolas. These are fucking murder-dolas!”
A sound rose up in the distance and both men turned to watch as, far offshore, Millie Brooks sped by in silhouette and disappeared again.
“Nah, man,” Rondack said. “We’re calling them gondos.”
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